CHAPTER 5: JAPAN AND WORLD WAR I
4.

THE NIKOLAYEVSK MASSACRE

Rape, slaughter, unimaginable atrocities
At the beginning of 1920 the objective of the Siberian expedition, i.e., the rescue of the CzechCorps, was near fruition. At that point the Japanese narrowed their operations down to the direct
defense of their Manchurian and Korean interests, announcing their plan to withdraw troops in thenear future. But then, a totally unexpected incident arose — an event of an unspeakable nature: theNikolayevsk Massacre.
Japan’s historians, history textbooks, and newspapers are wont to exaggerate atrocities allegedly
committed by Japanese troops. But for some inexplicable reason, they have been silent about theworst massacre of the 20th century, one in which more than 700 Japanese fell victim to communists.
It was just as if Japan’s chroniclers had turned a blind eye to the tragedy, and made a concerted
effort to expunge it from Japan’s collective memory and from the pages of history.
Nikolayevsk is a town situated on the bank of the Amur River opposite Sakhalin, where the river’s
estuary flows into the Sea of Okhotsk. At the beginning of 1920 Nikolayevsk was inhabited byapproximately 750 Japanese: civilians, an Army garrison, and a Navy signal corps. When Alliedtroops withdrew, 4,000 communist partisans (Russians, Koreans, and Chinese) surrounded andbesieged the town. The partisans entered into a truce with the Japanese garrison, which turned out
to be a ruse, and took control of Nikolayevsk. They then proceeded to establish a revolutionary
court that held trials and executed the “guilty.” On March 12, the third anniversary of the Russian
Revolution, fighting broke out between the communists and Japanese soldiers. The communists
annihilated most of the garrison and threw some 150 civilians into prison.
A Navy officer who was in Nikolayevsk at the time and witnessed the atrocities, managed, withgreat difficulty, to escape to Vladivostok. He kept an account of the atrocities committed by thecommunist partisans as he witnessed them, which appeared in the 20 April 1920 edition of theOsaka Mainichi Shinbun.
The radicals did not act on the spur of the moment. They had obviously made carefulplans.
During the first phase of their savagery, Russians were their victims. Thecommunists surrounded the homes of wealthy Russians. After brazenly robbing
them of all their assets, they herded all residents — old and young, men and women— into their houses and barricaded all exits from the outside. Then the communists
set fire to the houses and, showing no remorse whatsoever, incinerated theirinhabitants.
The targets of the communists’ second phase were pro-Japanese Russian
intelligentsia. They robbed, raped, and slaughtered intellectuals, unleashing pitilessbrutality against their unfortunate victims, whether government officials or private
citizens. During the third phase, the monsters ruthlessly and unrelentingly bared
their poisonous fangs, this time setting upon my compatriots. Finding words to1

describe such unspeakable brutality seems an unbearable, impossible task, but at thesame time, I feel driven to speak for the precious souls of the victims, and for thesake of benevolence and justice throughout the world as well. I hope those who readthis will understand.
The mob of rioters then gathered in a public space, where they satisfied theirloathsome lust at the expense of my female compatriots. Their depravity knew nolimits, as they amused themselves by severing their victims’ limbs, slashing orchopping off fingers, arms, and legs, making certain to cause as much pain as
possible during their murderous rampage.
The atrocities knew no end. The shameless attackers placed two horses side by sideand selected their next Japanese victim, male or female, it mattered not to them.
They tied one of their quarry’s legs tightly to the saddle of one horse and the otherleg to the saddle of the other. When the horses were turned loose and sped off, thevictim’s body was soon torn apart. I cannot imagine a more painful death. The
communists clearly enjoyed the spectacle, whooping and guffawing with pleasure,and jeering at the poor victims. Their voices joined together in a chorus — a chorusof jubilant savages. I cannot find words to describe their brutal, heinous acts, whicheven the most savage beast would never commit. Is there anyone in the world, has
there ever been anyone since the founding of our empire, who could find it in theirhearts to forgive these enemies of humanity itself?
My countrymen and women, having wept and wept until no more tears would come,made a firm resolve: “If we must die, we shall all die together. We shall depart fromthis fleeting existence, falling like cherry blossoms. We shall stay together and help
each other.” They then sought refuge at the consulate. Then the communist mob
seized all the assets belonging to my compatriots, residents of the town, andproceeded to commit other acts of violence, burning and destroying everything intheir path. Still, both our soldiers and consular staff members, knowing that they
were outnumbered, suppressed their grief and anger, and took great pains to avoid
confrontations with the attackers, instead exercising perseverance and prudence.
However, the angry mob grew more and more violent with every passing moment,
and began shooting at the consulate. The building was soon engulfed in flames, andthose inside then realized that they were doomed.
At that moment all the Japanese, men and women alike, rose to action. They resolved
to defend themselves by confronting the enemy. Every man among them took up aweapon and launched into a defensive battle, fighting stubbornly, together with theremaining garrison soldiers. Nor did the women shrink from danger. Rather than fallvictim to the vicious monsters, they would die bravely, together with the soldiers.
All of them raised their arms, vowed they would fight to the death, and immediately
took action.
Nevertheless, no matter how hard they fought, they continued to lose ground.
Moment by moment, their numbers decreased. Eventually, even the frail women
took up the rifles and pistols once brandished by their dead comrades, and while
receiving hasty instructions about loading and shooting the weapons, joined in thefighting. With their hearts full of regret, they made a final, valiant attempt against
the enemy, and every last one of them died a heroic death. In the end, there was2

hardly anyone left to fight. They had no more ammunition and had exhausted alltheir strength. But the few courageous women who had survived, along withwounded men who could still move, somehow managed to summon up the will tofight. They made a final, desperate attempt to fend off the enemy, together, until
they breathed their last within the roaring flames.

Handwriting on the wall bears witness
When the snow and ice had melted to some extent, Japan dispatched reinforcements toNikolayevsk. But in early May, before they could arrive, the communists had slaughtered every
single Japanese they had imprisoned. Out of 12,000 Nikolayevsk residents, the mob had massacredapproximately 6,000 souls who were opposed to communism. After setting fire to the town, theyburned it to the ground and fled. Among the victims were Vice-Consul Ishida Toramatsu, his wife,
384 civilian Japanese residents of Nikolayevsk (among them 184 women and children), and 351
Japanese soldiers. The communists had raped, tortured, and slaughtered some 750 Japanese.
Two weeks after the massacre, eight Japanese war correspondents visited the crime scene. The
following is an excerpt from their report on that visit as it appeared in the 13 June 1920 edition ofJiji Shinpō.
Of Nikolayevsk, which extends approximately 6 km from north to south, and 10 km
from east to west, only the chimneys of Russian stoves remained. Everywhere welooked, we saw only desolation. Brick houses had been blown up and reduced torubble. Wooden houses had burned to the ground, leaving no trace behind. Charred
telephone poles were lying on the ground. Our feet became entangled in electric
wires that had been knocked down. Scattered throughout the burned rubble werearticles of women’s clothing, shoes, cooking pots, children’s cots, and otherhousehold goods.
The prison was in the northern part of the town. As soon as we arrived there, weentered one section that had escaped the flames. Overcome by a terrible stench, allof us recoiled. That part of the building had been divided into eight rooms. We wereimmediately confronted with horrifying sights. Spoiled rice balls were scatteredaround, and the walls were spattered with what looked like fresh blood. A woman’s
red sash was hanging on a nail. There was graffiti on the walls, most of it in Room
No. 2, where someone had written “Never forget May 24, 1920 at 12 p.m.” Next toit was a drawing of the face of a clock that read “12:00.” We also saw several haiku:
The sun will soon rise
I lie awake worrying
Then the cuckoo calls
How splendid it isWhen someone admires flowers
That bloomed this morning
Another poem:
Yesterday misfortune seemed so far away
But now it has befallen me3

Elsewhere on the wall someone had written Bushidō. Most of the graffiti werewritten in pencil on the white-painted walls. Particularly heart-rending was a chart
showing the calendar days written in red pencil. It began with May 19 and ended
with June 23. Each day was crossed out up to May 24; the rest were unmarked. Onthe night of May 24, all 140 prisoners were dragged out of their jail, marched to thebank of the Amur River, stabbed to death and thrown into the water.
Our group of journalists paced back and forth for a short while, imagining theagonies of our countrymen. Then we headed for the riverbank. In front of theshipbuilding factory was a 650-square-foot vacant lot whose surface was soakedwith blood, now turning black. The blood of our compatriots! We made moregruesome discoveries: blood-drenched ropes used to bind the victims; a cotton crepe
shirt soaked with fresh blood that someone had retrieved from the river; more blood,huge amounts of it, splattered on the side of a boat. We were forced to avert oureyes! We imagined our compatriots suppressing their rage and regret as theysuccumbed to the poisonous blades on this terrible shore. We could not take evenone step forward without treading on their blood!
We paid a call on Commander Tsuno Kazusuke. His eyes brimming with tears, Maj.Gen. Tsuno said, “Every single one of our compatriots is dead. But while our grief
is unbearable, I am heartened by the knowledge that every one of them fought
bravely to the end, never resorting to mean or cowardly behavior.

At the end of his account of the Nikolayevsk Massacre in History of the Japanese People (Meijiand Taishō Eras), historian Shiroyanagi Shūko writes, “Seven hundred of our compatriots, bothyoung and old, fell victim to evil monsters — communist partisans — and for a long time became
demons on the Amur River. The torments the communists inflicted on our innocent compatriotswere cruel beyond description. As long as there is humanity in this world, it is unlikely that any
historian will be able to summon up the courage to write about the massacre.”1 However, when
one reads both the naval officer’s account and the journalists’ report, it is possible to imagine howterribly shocked the Japanese public was by the sheer brutality of the massacre.
Since the Meiji era, Japan’s conservatives (the so-called right wing) have wholeheartedly
supported ethnic revolutionaries in neighboring nations. However, they have consistently
demonstrated wariness and repudiation of communist revolutions, and that stance can certainly beattributed to the Nikolayevsk Massacre. Reports of this incident should be disseminated more
widely and memorialized so that it occupies its rightful place in political and intellectual history.
Japanese perspicacity about communist aggression0
Called the worst affront to Japan since the Mongolian invasions of the 13th century, theNikolayevsk Massacre did indeed enrage the Japanese people. Unsurprisingly, their hatred toward
Russia grew. Japanese troops placed the northern half of Sakhalin under protective occupation,which significantly delayed their withdrawal from Siberia.
Shiroyanagi Shūko, Meiji Taishō kokumin shi 1-5 (History of the Japanese people: Meiji and Taishō eras, 5vols.) (Tokyo: Chikura Shobō, 1936).
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Earlier in this chapter I included an excerpt from a dismissive account about Japan’s Siberian
Expedition in a Japanese textbook. I believe that readers will now perceive the extent to which that
account distorts the historical significance of Japan’s contribution. Additionally, I hope that thepublication’s editorial policy will be revealed for exactly what it is, i.e., an attempt to give theimpression that in participating, Japan had aggressive, ulterior motives. I do not think I need to tellreaders who had more insight into history — the Americans, who believed that the Bolsheviks
were democrats at heart, and who interfered with the Japanese expedition, using the Open Door
Policy in north Manchuria and Siberia as a pretext — or the Japanese, who kept their troops inSiberia to prevent the spread of communism from Siberia to Manchuria and Korea. Communism
did, however, infiltrate Manchuria and Korea from Siberia, and in doing so, strongly affected thecourse of history. Today we know it gave rise to the Manchurian Incident, the 2nd Sino-JapaneseWar, and ultimately, the Greater East Asian War.
Even today, 70 years later, the “open door” to Siberia and Maritime province remains completely
closed to the US and all other non-Soviet states. Obviously, the unshakable American convictionthat keeping the Japanese from making inroads in those areas would result in an open-door policyin Siberia was wrong. Here is historian Charles Tansill’s view:As a result of numerous conferences dealing with the Far East it was finally decidedto send General William S. Graves with a small army (9,014 officers and men) toSiberia to co-operate with an Allied expeditionary force. The duties assigned to thisforce were to assist the Czechs, help steady genuine Russian efforts at selfgovernment and self-defense, and to guard Allied military stores. The force under
Graves stayed in Siberia from August 1918 until April 1920. Its sole achievement
was to save the maritime provinces of Siberia for the ruthless rule of Red Russia.2

To this I add the opinion of George Bronson Rea, long-time editor in chief of Shanghai-based
Far Eastern Review:
Had Japan been permitted to act alone in Siberia, the Communist program for thedomination of Asia would never have passed the paper stage. … The dispatch of anAmerican army to Siberia made Asia safe for Communism. …32Tansill, op. cit., 53-54.

3

George Bronson Rea, The Case for Manchoukuo (New York: Appleton-Century Company, 1935), 341-42.

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